page_title: Troy Donahue
section_title: Surfside 6
hierarchical_section_title: Troy Donahue / Biography / Surfside 6
caption_attribution_description: Publicity photo of Troy Donahue and Margarita Sierra from the television program Surfside 6.
context_page_description: Troy Donahue was an American film and television actor and singer. He was a popular sex symbol in the 1950s and 1960s.
context_section_description: Instead, Warner Bros. put him in a TV series, Surfside 6 (1960–62), one of several spin-offs of 77 Sunset Strip, announced in April 1960. Another spinoff was Hawaiian Eye on which Donahue had guest-starred.
  On Surfside 6, Donahue starred with Van Williams, Lee Patterson, Diane McBain, and Margarita Sierra in the ABC series, set in Miami Beach, Florida.
  Donahue's career got a big break when Joshua Logan dropped out as director of Parrish (1961); Logan was replaced by Delmer Daves, who brought in Donahue as star, and the film was a hit.
  Donahue and Daves reunited for another melodrama, Susan Slade (1962). They made a fourth film, Rome Adventure (1962), a romance starring Suzanne Pleshette.
  In 1962, he claimed he received 5,000–7,500 fan letters a week. The following year, exhibitors voted him the 20th most popular star in the US. He was also popular in Japan.
  After Surfside 6 was cancelled, Donahue joined the cast of another ABC detective series, Hawaiian Eye, for its last season from 1962 to 1963 in the role of hotel director Philip Barton, with Robert Conrad and Connie Stevens in the series lead.
  "I guess because I was blond, blue-eyed, and tanned, people associated me with all those beach movies that were around then, even though I never did one", he later said. "I was always the goody-goody, the guy who did what he was supposed to."
  He did appear in a nearly beach-party film, Palm Springs Weekend (1963), alongside several other Warner Bros. players. As a change of pace, Pleshette and he were cast in a Western A Distant Trumpet (1964), the last film of director Raoul Walsh.
caption: Donahue with showgirl Margarita Sierra in the ABC/Warner Bros. television series Surfside 6 (1961)
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